Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review, June, 2025
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781620974117
“In this eye-opening debut study, Kadish, an American studies professor at Pace University, aims to show that MAGA-era racism is “less an aberration than a return to form” by pointing to a long history of white supremacist hoaxes in the U.S. Noting that many of the country’s major xenophobic, racist, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic movements were galvanized by “forgeries, impersonation,” and “bogus” data, Kadish explains that these hoaxes always had two goals: proving the “inferiority” of nonwhite races (which in earlier times also meant non-Protestant), and proving the existence of conspiracies against the white race (à la the “great replacement theory”). Among Kadish’s examples is the 1835 autobiography of Maria Monk, in which she claimed she had been raped by a Catholic priest while living as a nun and had fled her convent to avoid having her baby ritualistically strangled. Though revealed immediately as an anti-Catholic hoax (it was penned by the Protestant clergyman who actually fathered her child), it remained a bestseller for nearly two decades. Other examples include the work of Thomas Dixon, who wrote the novel the film The Birth of a Nation was based on, and Henry Ford’s spreading of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Kadish concludes by raising troubling concerns about how AI could lead to a “Great White Hoax era with a more thorough top-down, Soviet-style truth control.” This meticulous and captivating account makes a disturbing case that America is easily swayed by racist cons.“
Booklist
https://www.booklistonline.com/products/9807082
“Racism has been a constant aspect of American society from the days of the Pilgrims, but as racial prejudice became incrementally less amenable to the American aspirational ideal, it had to be packaged to make it acceptable. Kadish examines the history of this phenomenon, calling it the Great White Hoax. He defines it as starting in the 1830s, with white America repeatedly conjuring and voraciously consuming false evidence of two perennially useful falsehoods: doctored proof of the racial inferiority of nonwhites and invented conspiracies against white supremacy. The hoax was employed successfully against Chinese laborers, by the Ku Klux Klan against Black and Jewish people, against the Irish during their diaspora, even today, as MAGA weaves its fear-mongering stories about Black, brown, and LGBTQ people. Kadish sheds a necessary light on some largely forgotten, tragic periods of American history; readers will come away with the impression that our current state of racial unease should not be surprising. This book provides the valuable lesson that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Library Journal
Starred Review, April 2025
“In his first book, literary scholar Kadish (American Studies, Pace University) explores the American phenomenon he calls the “Great White Hoax.” Beginning in the 1830s through the mid-20th century, Americans feverishly consumed fake news stories and supposedly incontrovertible scientific proof of the inferiority of non-white people and conspiracies meant to promote white supremacy in the United States. These hoaxes targeted Black people, Chinese and Eastern European immigrants, Catholics, and Jews—anybody outside of the dominant white, Anglo-Saxon culture. “Viral” pre-internet newspaper articles that pushed racist lies even affected presidential elections and led to legislation based on those fake stories. To reach the widest audience possible, newspapers promoted sensationalistic narratives with little regard for the truth or facts. One early example involved the 1840 U.S. census, which purported to show that free Black people suffered from higher rates of mental illness than enslaved people. Though it was clear that faulty data led to this conclusion, many white people argued regardless that it demonstrated the inherent inferiority of Black people. The catalogue of racist hoaxes and misinformation in Kadish’s book provides a valuable template for modern readers to critically examine today’s hyper-partisan news media.
VERDICT This thoughtful and timely work will interest readers interested in American history, civil rights, and media studies.”
Foreword Reviews
(July/August 2025)
“Philip Kadish’s The Great White Hoax is a fresh history of American racial discourse centered on the cynical ways in which fraudulent narratives and outright hoaxes have manipulated public perceptions of race.
Told through a series of profiles, the book argues that American racial and class-based divisions are upheld through predictable patterns in storycraft. It shows how those with vested political interests fabricate sensational stories in order to create public outcry against vulnerable demographics and appropriate the “respectability” of objective sciences like statistics and craniometry in order to lend false credibility to otherwise shoddy or prejudiced research. These forces, the book reveals, shaped public prejudices from the very beginnings of the American popular press, even as social dynamics underwent dramatic changes.
Ranging examples illustrate the breadth of these patterns across time. They include a cynical anti-Chinese hoax intended to derail James Garfield’s presidential campaign, an anti-Catholic yarn about a murderous nunnery, and the manifold ways that “sciences” were used to malign and dehumanize Black Americans. Indeed, the book is comprehensive in showing how hoaxes uphold social castes and shape public prejudices. Each example is supported by a web of historical perspectives and contemporaneous developments, resulting in depth and continuity between disparate case studies. Some individual pairings don’t blend into an easy analysis: One chapter compares populist Henry Ford’s promotion of the antisemitic forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion with the upper-crust proponents of the early eugenics movement. But this is more than compensated for in each chapter’s stellar documentary research and clear-sighted connections across various contexts.
Revelatory and disturbing by turns, The Great White Hoax is a history of how American power brokers across three centuries created and encouraged flawed narratives about race.”
ISAAC RANDEL (July / August 2025)